Monday, December 31, 2012

If that doesn’t ring a bell, you’re just… well probably just
about everybody.

It was a bit from a gag-reel that circulated around radio
stations in the early eighties. A lot of tapes like this went around. Some were
on-air mishaps captured for posterity. Some were un-aired outtakes from
pre-recorded shows that the radio personality had hoped would be destroyed.
Many, though, were gag tapes of bogus radio shows or commercials put together
for fun by guys in the business. Being able to hear these as a kid was one of
the benefits of having a family member in broadcasting.

Held together with scotch tape, it still makes me laugh 30 years later.

Shortly after the legendary Boston radio station WRKO switched
from music to a talk radio format, my dad took on a weekend slot hosting a law
oriented call-in show. Since his slot was on Saturday afternoons, I often would
go to the station with him. One of my favorite childhood memories was being
able to run around an empty radio station (most of the staff had the weekends
off), playing in unused studios pretending to host my own show Sometimes I
would just hanging out in the offices surrounded by photos of RKO luminaries of
the day such as David Brudnoy, Jerry Williams and Gene Burns.

Then there were the tapes that dad would bring home. There was
the WRKO holiday tape featuring a mock broadcast with the on-air talent poking
fun at their own personas with risqué commercials thrown in. One memorable
segment featured the cantankerous Jerry Williams hosting a call-in show devoted
to romantic advice, telling a listener in an uncharacteristically soothing
voice to “drop that jerk and move on… Thanks for calling.” (This bit would have
been hysterical to people who remember Jerry Williams) Another standout bit had
a film noir-ish narrator telling of a late night encounter and (unprotected)
sex with a woman who, as it turned out, was married to a man who was being
released from prison that very day. “By then, I’d sobered up enough to get a
good look at her,” the narrator tells us before the punch-line reveals the bit
to be an advertisement: “Was I having a Maalox moment.”

Other tapes that dad brought home included the notorious
“Casey Kasem’s Bad Day,” (that was how it was labeled on my tape, but I have
seen it with other titles) a profanity-laced tirade captured during a taping of
American Top 40 (before hearing that tape, it never occurred to me that radio shows
could be pre-recorded). It’s easy to find now on YouTube, but to hear it back in
the 80s, you had to know someone who knew someone.

My favorite, though, was the WWWX tape. The introduction alone
made me laugh my ass off when the sonorous “voice-of-God” announcer proclaimed that
“WWWX gives Gary, Indiana what it fucking deserves.” After this, the entire bit
was the frothing, psychotic disc jockey, known only as “the Fucker,” unleashing
torrents of obscenity between songs by the likes of Raspberries, Alice Cooper,
and the Stones.

I never did find out the source of that tape. As far as I
know, there has never been a WWWX in Gary, Indiana. I think I heard, at some
point, that the tape was made as a joke (and obviously unaired) by some guys at
a station in nearby Chicago. From there it circulated from radio station to
radio station, as these tapes did, being heard by radio guys who would play it
for friends, never really going public.

But then, none of these tapes were really meant to be heard
by the public. “Casey Kasem’s Bad Day” was the exception to the rule. This
probably had to do with the fact that there was more public interest in hearing
the beloved radio personality losing his shit than hearing some unknown smart-assed
jock ranting and offering promotional giveaways such
as a “two gallon can of warm semen that Johnny Dildo left in here a few minutes
ago.” (Between these tapes and the George Carlin records he gave me, how could
my dad have been surprised that I would have ended up with the filthiest mouth
of any kid in the fifth grade?)

Then again, nobody really cares about Casey Kasem anymore
either, and his bad day has become as played out as the Jerky Boys. WWWX and
the fucker, however, has remained blissfully obscure, too unknown even for cult
status. Nothing more than a secret handshake for aging radio guys, an in-joke
which is fading from memory as quickly as radio itself is.

But it made me roar as a kid, even when I didn’t know what
half of it meant. This type of material has never disappeared. I hardly need to
remind anyone that parodies of radio shows, TV shows, and movies are ubiquitous
on sites like YouTube, and most people with a computer have the ability to make
these, and with decent production values to boot. Give me an hour and I could
make something as puerile and nasty as WWWX and have it up on the web. Or
course, it would probably get buried in the avalanche of DIY humor and no one
would hear it. But back then, grown men (and I do mean “men” as it is mostly
overgrown boys who would find this stupid shit funny), who were true professionals,
would use state of the art broadcasting and recording equipment to make dick
jokes. And then other grown men, also trusted professionals in that field,
would play it for their friends and giggle. And that is even funnier to me than
the tapes themselves.

Friday, December 21, 2012

Why Wolfgang's Vault is an Affront to Collectors

It seems that every day I get an email from Wolfgang’s Vault
advertising classic live concert recordings that have newly been made available
for streaming on their site. They inform
me of newly offered recordings by classic rockers like the Kinks, Bruce
Springsteen, and Traffic, adding that they threw in some old jazz, and uploaded
shows by a couple of artists who have recently died. It would be easy to refer
to these emails as spam, but the volume of material that keeps coming out is
impressive. The Vault, which focuses mostly on music of the sixties and
seventies and also sells collectibles from these shows and artists, is a treasure
trove, one-stop shopping for nostalgic
baby boomers.

Established in 2003 when businessman Bill Sagan bought the
archives of the late, legendary impresario
Bill Graham, Wolfgang’s Vault (named for Graham’s childhood nickname
when he was growing up in Germany) began as a site for selling the rock
memorabilia obtained in the purchase. Finding that much of what was in the
vaults were privately made concert recordings, the site began allowing the free
streaming of old concerts, making some available for paid download. As
recordings became more and more the focal point of the website, Sagan and his
organization obtained more collections (such as the tapes from the King Biscuit Flower Hour, the legendary
radio concert series), making more and more high quality recordings available.

Years before, most of these recordings have been sold as
bootleg albums and CDs and have also circulated freely in trading circles.
However, distancing themselves from the “bootleg” stigma, Wolfgang’s Vault has
projected an image of respectability. A 2005 article in the Wall Street Journal, portrayed Sagan as
equal parts businessman and fanatic, meticulously combing through the catalog
of live recordings, obtaining permissions and creating revenue-sharing deals.
However, the site and his efforts have not been free of controversy, and he was
sued in 2006 by a number of the bands whose material he was streaming on the
site.

I have not been able to find details about the subsequent
settlements, but I can only speculate that Wolfgang’s Vault ultimately offered
more favorable terms to the copyright owners on the songs who ultimately found
it best to join Sagan rather than fight him. And who can blame them? In a time
when record company earnings had plummeted due to peer-to-peer file sharing, it
makes perfect sense to open up new revenue streams based on “previously
unavailable” material.

As a music fan who is quite simpatico with the boomers in
terms of musical taste, one might think that I would be enthralled every time I
receive one of these missives from Wolfgang’s Vault. In fact, I’m just annoyed
(and not just because it fills up my inbox).

This is not so say that many of the recordings they have
aren’t great. They are. In fact, many recordings featured on that website have
been in my collection for years, and they definitely are worth listening to.
That’s the thing though: Why should I get excited about the ability to listen
in shoddy quality streaming audio to recordings that I already have in better
sounding formats?

I am aware that a lot of these are new to more casual music
listeners who haven’t spent years hunting down bootleg recordings. I also admit
that I probably sound like a jerk for even the vaguest insinuation that only an
elite set of hardcore geeks should have access to them, or that the poor sound
quality on the website would never be acceptable to people who truly care about
music.

I don’t mean to say these things. On the other hand, I don’t
mean not to say them either. I don’t mean to sound elitist, and I acknowledge
that this sort of pretentiousness is hard to swallow particularly when coming
from someone who sits alone in darkened rooms listening to records, but given
the amount of time and money that I and so many other have spent obtaining
these recordings throughout the years, can you blame me for feeling, at the
very least, a little bit ambivalent about these recordings these being made a
little too easily available?

_________________________

My first boot. A cheap cassette dub of this CD.

I remember buying my first bootleg when I was 17. On an
early summer day in Northampton, Massachusetts, I stumbled across a guy selling
cassettes out of the back of his car. Not elegantly packaged, there was no
cover art except for a handwritten cassette insert (actually, a xeroxed copy)
with the most basic information about the recording (who, where, when) and a
track listing. Little attention was paid to quality. They were dubbed onto
normal bias Maxell UR 90s (as opposed to the high bias XLII-S cassettes that I
used myself and were held in high esteem in bootleg trading circles), but they
were documents that I would not be able to get a regular record store.

The tape I bought that day was a concert by The Who from
Amsterdam in 1969 featuring a (more or less) complete performance of Tommy. I had never heard this before (a
complete live performance of Tommy by
the original band was not made officially available until the Live at the Isle
of Wight album was released a couple of years later.) It was imperfect, to say
the least. The sound quality, while a soundboard recording, was not that of an
official release, but for the first time, I realized that I was not limited to
official releases to satisfy my obsessive collecting urges. Moreover, I liked
the idea that these were complete shows, not recordings culled from several dates,
then edited and overdubbed in the studio to ensure that the product was
consistent with the image and sound that the band wanted to put across. These
were what the band sounded like onstage at that time, on that night, warts and
all. At the same time, part of the appeal of bootleg collecting was finding
something that was rarified, something not available through normal channels.

In college, I bought my first bootleg CD, Tales from the Who, a less than complete
but otherwise excellent document of The Who’s concert in Philadelphia on their
1973 Quadrophenia tour. Going to
school in Boston, I found several places where I could get my fixes, mostly in
places around Harvard Square: Mystery Train, Second Coming Records. Sometimes pickings
were slim. At Mystery Train, they just had a little box at the counter in which
they kept the bootlegs, and they weren’t cheap either. Still, I made some nice
acquisitions during my undergraduate years.

After moving to New York, I used to cruise through shops in
the Village like Subterranean, Generation Records, Rockit Scientist Records,
and Bleecker Street Records, looking through their bins for a bunch of little
holy grails: The complete Beach Boys’ Smile
Sessions, rough session tapes of the Traveling Wilburys, outtakes and live
material from the short-lived supergroup, Blind Faith. I got used to getting
home and finding out that I paid $25 for a stinker, but separating the wheat
from the chaff was part of it. It was all about finding the rare gem. I also got
used to occasionally seeing the stores almost completely emptied of stock after
being raided by the Feds.

I will not lie and try to say that bragging rights were not
at least a small part of the joy of acquisition, however, I will defend myself
in saying that I never hoarded. I was always willing and eager to make copies
for friends, particularly after I got my first CD burner. In fact, turning
people onto to recordings that they would otherwise never hear was as much fun
for me as was hearing them myself, almost.

Another thing that happened when I got my first burner was
that I began trading.

When I started trading, it was still mostly being done by
mail, but with contacts being made online. At first I had my list of recordings
(along with ratings of quality, and my personal rules of trading) which I would
send to prospects via email. Eventually, I had my list hosted online and found
that I was being approached by traders who had found items on my list that they
coveted.

I found that every trader had different rules, with some
being more stringent than others. Many
rules were technical, such as what kind of discs to use (I had a problem with
Memorex discs at that time), what kind of mailers to use (fiber cushioned
mailers were generally frowned upon since they would explode with lint and dust
when opened), and ensuring that files were “lossless” (meaning having ever been
encoded to MP3 or any other source that resulted in signal loss after being
decompressed). Mainly, though, at the
core of it was being honest with one another and supportive of the artists,
being sure not to do any trading of officially released material. Furthermore,
we always supported the artists by purchasing their official releases and going
to their concerts. When I started trading, it was nice to no longer be
dependent on bootleggers for my live music fixes, and to know that I was no
longer putting money into the wrong people’s pockets. I would occasionally
still buy bootlegs, but was comforted in the knowledge that I was taking the
hit for my fellow traders, and I would be able to provide the material to other
real fans free of charge. In trading lingo, this would be referred to as a
“liberated bootleg.” Perhaps it was an “honor amongst thieves” mentality, but
we argued that what we were doing was not unethical (Illegal is a whole other
thing) and that we engaged in trading because we were true fans.

Memorex discs did not work with my players.
They would usually end up being used as coasters

Trading was almost as much fun as cruising through dusty
record store in the Village or Harvard Square. True, there was less effort put
into the search, and looking through someone’s list online provided a less
tactile type of thrill, but I was blown away by the sheer amount of material
that was available. The thrill of getting a padded envelope filled with 6, 8,
or sometimes even 12 discs (almost invariably even numbers , as the CD sleeves
were double sided) almost made up for the decrease of the joy of the search. I
would spend the next week or so listening through to all of the discs, checking
them for glitches, rating the performances, and yes, actually enjoying them. I
would create artwork for the jewelcases (spending extra time to make
particularly elegant packages for exceptional recordings that I knew I would
give to friends), put them on the shelf, and move on, revisiting favorites from
time to time.

When I got a high-speed internet connection, I found a
number of torrent sites (sites which use Bittorrent software to make
downloading faster by having a group of hosts upload and download from one
another simultaneously) from which I
could obtain lossless. Most of these sites arose out of the old snail-mail
trading communities.

The wealth of material available was staggering, and the
ease of downloading made me grab things that I would not have otherwise
searched out. In fact, it was not long before I found that I was searching less
and less for things. I found myself getting to a place where I would see what
was newly uploaded and would grab whatever seemed relatively interesting. I
became quickly overwhelmed. It was not long before I found myself compulsively
downloading things and not listening to them. The idea of wading through my
download folder was too exhausting, with the constant additions making it even
more daunting a task.

Still, many of the recordings were still of great quality.
Often times a show would be posted on a site, only to have other collectors
posting their versions of the same concert but from different recording sources,
allowing the best version to emerge at the top. Often a better quality
recording would emerge of a show that I had obtained year prior and allow me to
listen to it with a fresh set of ears. It was enough to get me back to chipping
away at the download folder now and again.

That’s the way it’s gone for the last few years. I do feel
like I’ve slacked off a bit. When I think back to a decade ago, I am amazed at
the amount of work I used to put into finding and hearing music, combing
Greenwich Village record stores that carried bootleg vinyl and CDs, usually
paying around 25 dollars for a single disc. Even when I did more trading than
buying, it was a time consuming process involving sending CDR copies of
recordings by mail, fostering relationships with traders, keeping databases of
what I had sent out and what I expected back, how long it took for someone to
get back to me, who were good traders and who ended up fucking me in the end.
Of course, this was my early twenties. This was still at a time when I was
known to camp out on the street for concert tickets. I was young. I had time
and money (I am not sure why I don’t seem to have either of those anymore). I
was as committed a fan as any an artist could hope for.

I still collect. The only bootlegs I actually buy tend to be
old vinyl discs of particular historical value. But even when downloading them, I try not to
let them merely languish on a hard drive like many people I know. I still burn
them to CD, and though at some point along the way, I did cease to making jewel
case art, I continue to make ornate labels printed on the discs to give to
friends. Of course, I do this in spite of the fact that I know that when I give
these away, the recipients are generally ripping the discs to iTunes and then
burying them at the bottom of a drawer or simply throwing them away. Still,
it’s a way for me to keeping up some level of effort and engagement while
trying to keep it somewhat tactile.

_________________________

I suppose the existence of something like Wolfgang’s Vault
shouldn’t bother me. After all, with the torrent sites, it is almost just as
easy to get lossless recordings of shows as it is to stream them on the Vault.
Perhaps that’s the problem, that the days of the hunt are largely gone. As
someone who used to search for these recordings, sometimes overpay for them,
and sometimes cajole hoarding traders for them when they would rather sit on
them, I cannot help but feel that they have been devalued. And this is
admittedly a difficult feat, considering that many of them have been free for
years. However, with a website that provides one-stop shopping, taking away all
the work, and instantly delivers sonically inferior versions of these
recordings, it not hard to see how the value has gone below merely “free” and
is now merely “common.”

I understand that the same can, and will be said about
recorded music in general. I am one of those people who have long argued that
the shift from records, tapes, and CDs to digital downloads and ultimately
streaming audio has had a hugely detrimental effect on music fandom and
engagement. Legitimate releases have similarly suffered from that shift to
intangible formats of decreased quality, which I believe has led, to a great
extent, to less deep engagement with individual works being replaced by more
superficial listening to a myriad of recordings (I am not arguing that the in
depth listening experience has disappeared, particularly not within the group
of people who identify themselves as rabid music fans, but I do assert that
that kind of listening experience is not as much the norm as it was when
tangible music formats dominated). Sites like Spotify allow listeners to stream
official releases with the same ease as one can listen to boots on Wolfgang’s
Vault.

The reason that Wolfgang’s Vault bothers me more than sites
like Spotify, though, is that in the past the people that collected bootleg
recordings were like a little club, a community of enthusiastic music fans.
Sure, most of the people in the club were geeky, socially awkward fetishists,
but we were also informed and engaged. We were constantly exploring, hunting
for that holy grail, that unobtainable gem. We were unified by a view that what
we got out of music was related to what we put into it. By streaming them, they
take quality away from the recordings, but more, they take away half the fun,
the joy of the search, the excitement of finding something rare.

Sure, we are still out there, still trying to find the best
version of a given show, still trying to find the show that is still lurking in
a private collection or warehouse, but for me there is a hint of bitterness
that the most casual fan can stream that Who show from Philly in ’73 that I found
in a little box in a dank little basement store on Newbury Street. Don’t get me
wrong, I don’t think that music should be exclusive, but I still feel like someone
kicked the clubhouse door open and started flooding the place with people who
didn’t pay their dues.